'The Children' Highlights The Next Ghost House Slate

Ghost House Pictures may not win over hardcore horror fans in movie theaters, what with all the PG-13 Grudge filled MessengerBoogeymen (a few more in the vein of Drag Me To Hell couldn't hurt, though), but their DVD branding Ghost House Underground is a different story. Created in 2008 as a collaboration with Lionsgate Home Entertainment, you may remember last October GHU went all in with a round of eight titles to prove to fans their intent to give straight-to-DVD sequels and independent gems a safe haven in the retail world. Greg Bishop's blast of fun Dance of the Dead was easily the cream of the crop, but No Man's Land: Rise of the Reekerand The Substitute are both solid titles that may have gotten the shaft in American markets were it not for GHU.

Which brings us to 2009 and the first batch of titles announced for this October on both DVD and Blu-ray: Seventh Moon, The Thaw, Offspring, and The Children., all four of which are must-see titles for me. Despite playing to mixed acclaim at a few festivals, I'm looking forward to the Amy Smart-starring Seventh Moon, directed by Eduardo Sanchez. Even putting aside his contribution to The Blair Witch Project, Sanchez's first solo film Altered banked enough credit with me to give him the benefit of the doubt on his China set haunter. I haven't heard early talk about either The Thaw or Offspring, but the former has Val Kilmer in it and is about a new biological terror that squirms out of a frozen core sample while the latter is an adaptation of Jack Ketchum's novel about marauding cannibals. Can't complain too much on those two fronts. Then of course, we have Tom Shankland's The Children.

I'm getting to sound like a broken record here (or corrupted mp3 for the young nerds out there), which means I fear I'm walking the borderland between enthusiasm and hype, but I love The Children. The Brit shocker may not be the deepest or the most poignant breed of horror possible, but it is simple, to the point, pulse pounding and, frankly, shocking. Some airplane leaving England has a Region 3 copy of the DVD inbound for my grubby hands as I type, but I may just have to upgrade to the Ghost House Underground Blu-ray this October.

There are no details available for what features will accompany the films, but in the mean time all four covers are ready for ogling.